AI confronts unconscious bias with Eskalera during International Women's Month

Eskalera, Burns Group and Catalyst Launch #BiasCorrect Campaign

SAN FRANCISCO, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Determined to remove barriers and drive change in the workplace, Eskalera, a future-forward Human Capital Management platform that uses machine learning to create more inclusive workplaces, partnered with Catalyst, a global nonprofit focused on creating workplaces that work for women, and Burns Group, a NYC-based brand transformation company, to support their #BiasCorrect campaign for International Women's Day 2019.

"Eskalera is thrilled to be a partner in support of Catalyst's initiative," said Tom Chavez, Eskalera CEO. "This development amplifies Catalyst's important gender equity research by providing a tool that intelligently enables more inclusive dialogue."

Eskalera's mission is to help employees make their voices heard and contribute to workplaces that reflect their values and priorities. With the help of specialized machine learning and new data-driven software, the company's hope is that technology such as the #BiasCorrect Plug-in can help bring awareness and mindful practice to workplace interactions.

The premise of Catalyst's #BiasCorrect Campaign is that women and men leaders with the exact same qualities are often described in very different ways due to unconscious gender bias. Eskalera developed the BiasCorrect Plug-In, which is a Slack application that can be added to any Slack communication channel. The application flags messages in real-time conversations which it detects may have negative gender bias. When triggered, the author of the message will see a private message highlighting the possible bias, and offering suggestions for alternate, unbiased wording. The author can choose whether or not to replace the word and can also learn more.

As this is the first application of its kind being offered at scale, Eskalera made the software available via open source code in an effort to encourage change across every chat platform. Eskalera will also integrate the gender bias detection algorithms from the BiasCorrect Plug-In into its future-forward Human Capital Management platform giving employers and employees the insights and tools they need to address unconscious gender bias in their respective organizations.

The campaign arrives at a time when there's increased scrutiny about the treatment of women in the workplace.

To learn more, please visit http://eskalera.com/2019/02/25/catalyst/

About Eskalera

Through a combination of AI, data science, and evidence-based findings on implicit bias and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), Eskalera enables large and medium-sized companies to transform their HR operations by improving employee engagement, productivity, and growth.

Our prime directive is to partner with progressive companies seeking to cultivate inclusive culture as a source of competitive advantage. Our end-to-end platform arms HR professionals with the tools to participate fully in the cloud/AI revolution. We embed best practices for D&I into our software to mitigate cognitive and systemic bias across every stage of the employee lifecycle.

By capturing, processing, and analyzing data from easy-to-use mobile and desktop experiences, companies on Eskalera gain a real-time view of the zeitgeist of their employee base across levels and functions, leverage those insights to drive measurable business results through people, and enable their employees to succeed in competitive, fast-moving markets.